RE: Barracuda Evaluation

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On
Behalf Of Diez B. Roggisch
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 2:28 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Barracuda: Barracuda Evaluation


Hi,

> I'm evaluating Barracuda framework and comparing it against other open-
> source frameworks of the type.
>
> I was curious to find out from people who have actually used Barracuda on
> large-or medium-sized projects:
> 1. How has your overall experience with Barracuda been? Positive,
negative,
> mixed?

The learnig-curve is quite steep. And you should have one or even a few
developers who produce mockups/example code (or actually used code, but
which
is clear and documented), and make the less expierienced ones look at this.
Soon some sort of best-practices should emerge.

Once after that stage has been achieved, its really wonderful to work with
barracuda. I personally haven't seen anything better (at least in the
java-world, ZPT (Zope page templates) have a very similar approach.) And I
just recently had to work with JSPs and have to say that I prefer even PHP
over them. Barracudas clean code/layout separation is definitely the way to
go.

The event and form mapping are outstanding. The latter one is used by us in
nearly every app that has to deal with HTTP, even if we aren't responsible
for the actual front-end.

> 2. What problems have you encountered in design/development stages of your
> project that are related to this framework?

For us, the biggest problem was that HTML-rendering is something nearly
every
developer believes he/she knows how to do. So you'll end up with code
putting
together html tags as Strings, and returning these as BTexts.

In comparision, nobody would abandon an CMP Entity beans for a BMP just
because one has done SQL-queries before.

This is a major problem. You have to somewhat force them to actually _use_
the
component model. For us, that resulted in a great deal of reusable code -
e.g. baseclasses for rendering content items, which were subclassed to
perform item-type-specific code. Or general purpose classes, lets say for
paging result lists or shared parts of the page like the navigation and
personalization stuff. We didn't encounter anything that wasn't doable in
barracuda in a clean, nice way. But you have to think the barracuda way ;)

And thus, it somewhat separates actual developers from "webmonkeys". While
this might sound harsh, its a fact (and I think a desirable one) that you
don't have to put a weak developer resource onto a simple task like changing
the table-layout of your page, because the designers lack the capability of
messing with the code/layout mix of JSP/PHP/ASP. Thats purely done in the
HTML, by the designers.


> 3. What, in your opinion, is missing in this framework

I once started writing a filter-framework, that could be applied to data
(lets
say dates or other complex types) hold in the application objects. That
allowed for controlling the layout of these using an xml-descriptor easily
to
be manipulated by designers, not the developers. Think of a date: When first
designing a screen, it might have been appropriate to represent a date and
time like this:

3/8/2003, 12:00

So its sufficient to store that as a single value in a model (think of a
model
as a hashmap).

But then the screen designers decided to split the thing in two halfs,
making
it necessary to actually have two keys in the respective model. The
filterframework allowed to make a copy of a value, and then apply different
formats/filters to them. That would result in one date and one time that
could be used independendly. Currently, you have to alter your code for
that,
or think of it beforhand.

It is in my contrib package, but lacks docs and to be honest, I would like
to
write it from scratch. I would like to add dynamic CSS classes and some
other
stuff. But this is not a lacking feature which tackles the actual usability
of barracuda. It would just make things nicer and keep me even further away
from messing with HTML :)

HTH,

Diez
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